~,r~/\ I·~·· ,I . I I HOW TO READ FOUCAULT Adanl W. Warner Kalamazoo College SIP June 2007-May 2008 ! I 2 Acknowledgements o . To my advisor Chris Latiolais. He provided all the right readings, at all the right times. More importantly, he at all times respected my circuitous and idiosyncratic process. On that note, this project would not have been possible without the funding of Kalamazoo College for the summer of 2007. To Sejal Sut~ria, who was always willing to discuss the inevitable personal and intellectual difficulties that arise in the pursuit of this type of project; for always taking seriously the precarious intersection between life and text. To Erika Jost for stimulating 90nversations, and endless journeys into the depths of Kant, Heidegger and language. To Noah Manager, Julia Gartrell, Piper Worthington, and Liz Wilson, whose own projects permeated mine most certainly through osmosis. Finally, to my parents, and brother whose support was indispensable. They took the same interest in this project, as my mother put it, as they did when I lectured on dinosaurs, space, action figures, baseball cards ... , ' , oI 2 3 i,'~) \ .... ' , ."----.. , , I I: I, I I I I I' I \ i I: I I,, ' Snelgrave: And history? What does history tell you now? \ I Bunce: Not sure how that works, sir. I I , ' From One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace I I I I I 3 I 1:1 4 v~ INTRODUCTION: HOW TO READ FOUCAULT \ PART I: THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM OF MODERNITY I. The Kantian Paradox and Hegelian Solution II. The Analytic of Finitude: The Hegelian Specter: The Archaeology pte 1 III. Hegel and The Counter-Discourse of Modernity: The Genealogy pt. 2 PART II: FOUCAULT AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN I~ The Linguistic Turn and Modernity: Rorty and Habermas I I· II. Network, Background and Social Reality ~ I I CONCLUSION: 4 Ill~ 5 Introduction: HOW TO READ (AND NOT READ) FOUCAULT The critical corpus of Michel Foucault is about a lot of things. It is about madness, sexuality, modern medicine, science, prisons, history, systems ofthought, language, ethics, modernity, the ancients, power, knowledge, power/knowledge, and so on. Since his death in 1984, Foucault's writings on these topics have nev~r ceased to fascinate other thinkers. While Foucault is commonly thought of as a phIlosopher, his texts have settled comfortably in humanities and social science departments throughout the United States. I i , In fact, Foucault's vision ofthe 'anti-science' (genealogy),that method which seeks to ! , , unearth the 'disqualified' and 'subjugated' knowledges suppressed in the local histories I I of our culture, has inspired the emergence of a host of sub-disciplines from queer theory I I I' to the post-colonialism of Edward Said to the New Historicism ofliterary critic Stephen Greenblatt. Additionally, it has made a significant impact in other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology (symbolic violence), feminism (the body), the history of ideas (the archaeological method), and political theory (power). In a telling remark, queer theorist William Turner captures the significance of Foucault's thought when he declares: "The con~itions ofpossibility for queer theory probably arose somewhere between the publication of two of Foucault's major works: The Order ofThings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences in 1966 and Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison in 1975.',1 This statement is of pasrticular interest since it suggests that Foucault's writing enabled practitioners ofthese disciplines to investigate, interrogate, and lay bare an entire range of phenomena tied to the relationship between identity, socialization, and natural i j.......... I William Turner. A Genealogy ofQueer Theory. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ,,/ 2000), p. 10. ' ,>-/ 5 6 and human scientific knowledge that were not before intelligible. In other words, Turner and others implicitly suggest that before Foucault a certain number of questions and I I. ! positions with respect to social phenomena were not available. The question, therefore, is how does the critical body of Michel Foucault provide the 'conditions ofpossibility' for a type of thought that has come to characterize our age? The literary critic and social activist Edward Said is perhaps singularly responsible for the arrival of Foucault to the United States. It was his committed and I sustained engagement that assured Foucault's mainstay in humanities departments. I I I Unlike other Foucault scholars, Said's engagement with the writings of Foucault is , , I marked by a progressive disillusionment. We see this reflected in his scholarship: over ! the years references to Foucault begin to disappear, and if they do appear in later works, I he positions the intent and goals of the study in opposition to the cited works. From the I time of his groundbreaking work Orientalism, in which Foucault's archaeological definition of 'discourse' occupies a central role, to his later writings on 'democracy' and 'humanism', Said begins to distance himself from the methodological practice he found so promising decades earlier.2 On the basis ofthis trend, Said's progressive disillusionment can be understood to implicitly provide an answer to the above quest~on. In a critical reflection on the proper scope and limit of the literary critical phenomenon 'theory', Said takes aim at Foucault's then vogue 'theory of power.' It was 1982, and a general backlash against the meteoric success of a certain style of French thinking was prevalent in academic ~iscussions throughout the West. Being the devout 2 Edward Said. Orientalism. (New York: Vintage, 1979). I ~~, , 6 _~I 1:1. 7 Luckasian and Humanist that he was, Said began to question what kind of emancipatory \"-~ i'''-- ' potential the theoretician of power really offered, That is, if 'theorizing' was going to I,' mean anything, then it seemed necessary for it to leave room for the possibility of resistances and counter-movements to the prevailing hegemonic discourses of late 20th century capitalism and neo-colonialism, For Said this was particularly important given' his life-long commitment to the Palestinian struggle for independence. Thus, in his reflection on the theory of power Said runs the gamut of the typical criticisms of Foucault's writings on the subject: Ifpower is everywhere how can we resist it? How can Foucault justify the legitimacy of his own discourse, if all discourses are exercises of power? Does the theory of power allow us to make categorical distinctions between the just and the unjust? While these criticisms of Foucault are important, I am less interested in the particular arguments he raises. What I do find interesting is Said's preface to this argument that dually reflects on the genesis of the Foucaultian oeuvre. Said writes: "With I I descriptions and particularized observations of this sort I have no trouble. It is when Foucault's own language becomes general ... that the methodological breakthrough becomes a trap.,,3 In a move uncharacteristic 'of Foucault scholars and readers, Said prefers the 'archaeology' to that of the 'genealogy'. Said argues that whereas the archaeological method restricts itself to 'particularized observations' about the genesis of , ' I a discipline, and the way in which this discipline understands itself over time, the genealogy is perverted since it unnecessarily generalizes particular instances to social and political phenomena as such. Thus, the transition from Foucault's initial thoughts on 3Edward Said. "Traveling Theory" In The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage, \ ./ 2000), p. 213 I' , 7 8 'discourse' to his writings on 'power' marks aregression in critical import due to the move away from particular case studies, which inevitably leads to theoretical totalization. Ifwe look at one of Said's first reflections on Foucault's work - specifically the archaeology - it is possible to discern precisely what he means in the above diagnosis. In "Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination', Said cautions readers of Foucault to avoid the tendency to hastily define his work as 'philosophical, or historical for that matter. ,4 Moreover, he urges practitioners of other disciplines - and he lists literary critics, novelists, psychologists, biologists, and linguists - to avoid reading Foucault as providing a 'key'to unlock discourses.'s While, Said acknowledges the powerful conceptual resource Foucault's writings yield within the various historical localities that they take as an object, he is reluctant to ascribe a general methodological procedure to this way of thinking. Moreover, he does not think Foucault should be read as doingso either. It is interesting to note the consistency of Said's argument with other scholars who discuss the specifically philosophical dimension of Foucault's work. I am thinking here specifically ofthe American Foucault scholar Garry Gutting. More than any Foucault scholar, Gutting has consistently rejected a reading of Foucault that develops a systematic coherency to his body ofwork. Gutting argues that Foucault's self- characterizations are 'retrospective illusions' or 'afterthoughts' that arenot to be taken as either legitimate or reliable indications of the true intent of his work. Gutting argues that to do so would result in the suppression of a particular historiographical insight that pertains to the special relation Foucault's methodological practice has with the French 4 Edward Said. "Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination" In The Edward Said Reader, edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. (New York: Vintage,